In light of the ruling, the Port Orchard City Council on Tuesday
considered a draft policy to formalize the understanding that
personal emails of elected officials related to city business are
public records.

City staff partially filled Kirkpatrick’s request and on May 10,
2012, said the first installment was available for pickup, but she
never showed and did not respond to a letter saying the request
would be closed on June 11, 2012, if the city did not hear further
from her. (Kirkpatrick did not respond to a request for comment
emailed to her Tuesday by the Kitsap Sun.)

Had Kirkpatrick pursued the request, it would have generated an
estimated 300,000 emails — enough to fill up approximately 15 CDs.
A scouring of data systems for emails that met the criteria of the
request would have included elected officials’ personal
computers.

Rinearson said she had a good working relationship with her
predecessor, but she never learned why Kirkpatrick made the
request. No lawsuit against the city ever came from it. Kirkpatrick
later in 2012 went to work for the city of Pacific and was fired in
February 2013 by Cy Sun, embattled mayor of that troubled city.
Kirkpatrick told KIRO radio “she had no idea what she was getting
into.”

Rinearson does not dispute that Kirkpatrick had a right to the
records, she just wants an official policy guaranteeing she can
collect any emails that aren’t directly within her control and
produce them in a timely way to protect the city from a suit such
as Bainbridge faces. Rinearson, a member of the Washington
Association of Public Records Officers, also is the city’s risk
manager.

In the Bainbridge lawsuit, three council members — Steve
Bonkowski, David Ward and former councilwoman Debbie Lester — are
alleged by two community activists to have used their personal
email accounts to conduct city business, in violation of a city
policy. Althea Paulson, a political blogger, and Bob Fortner, a
self-proclaimed community watchdog, earlier this year made records
requests for correspondence between the city’s utility committee
chairwoman and other city officials.

The two allege that the city and the three council members did
not fully disclose personal emails in a timely way. Judge Jeanette
Dalton dismissed the council members themselves from the lawsuit
but
held the city accountable to produce the records. Her ruling on
whether public records laws were violated is to come on Friday.

Unlike Bainbridge, which prohibits use of council members’
personal email accounts, Port Orchard doesn’t have a formal policy
on how to handle elected officials personal emails. Council members
have been advised on a number of occasions that their personal
emails related to city business can be considered public
records.

“My concern is this year we’ve had an increase in citizens
wanting personal emails,” said City Clerk Brandy Rinearson, who is
in charge of wrangling records “responsive” to requests. That’s
true whether they’re official city emails or emails sent to or from
a personal account.

“So I’m at the mercy of someone providing that document to me in
a reasonable amount of time,” Rinearson said.

State law requires agencies to respond within five days on the
status of a request but the law is vague on time frames within
which installations of large email requests should be
delivered.

“Bainbridge Island had a policy that got them into trouble,”
Rinearson said. “We need to have certain precautions in place. … At
least if we go into litigation, then we can say we followed our
policy.”